From Collection to Encyclopedia: Issues and Milestones
of an Exemplary Undertaking
Antoine Baudin

The Italian-Swiss architect Alberto Sartoris owes a large share of
his fame to his intensive activities as a propagandist and cultural
activist. From 1932 to 1957, with Milan publisher Ulrico Hoepli,
he published six major works which have become legendary: the
three editions, each one larger than the previous, of Gli elementi
dell’architettura funzionale: Synthesis panoramica dell'architettura
moderna (1932; 1935; 1941: 1135 illustrations); then, using the
same principle of a visual panorama, the three volumes of
L’Encyclopédie de l’architecture nouvelle (1948–1957, in French),
which contained 2230 images, mostly photographs. These
publishing undertakings, unmatched in scope and duration, were
a major contribution to the establishment of a definitive reference
corpus of the international Modern Movement.
The collection of photographs of modern architecture that Sartoris
assembled during those 25 years was specifically for his
publishing endeavors. Of this collection, over 8000 original prints
remain, dating from the 1920s to the 1950s, not to mention the
hundreds of photographs of Sartoris’s own architectural works
and the many other later examples of iconography. Three quarters
of the prints are views of completed projects; the rest are of
maquettes and of many other types of graphic representation. The
collection's documentary significance is exceptional, despite
some imbalance in representation depending on the country (one
third of the collection deals with Italy alone); it illustrates the
founding period of the Modern Movement and its different phases
of development, right up to its definitive institutionalization in the
field of architecture. Almost 2000 works of architecture are
included, for the most part designed prior to 1940, by some 650
architects from every continent. It encompasses most of the
emblematic constructions of international modernism (in other
words, primarily Western European), and many peripheral and/or
“forgotten” examples.
Beyond the collection’s documentary value, its general interpretation
poses multiple problems, requiring consideration of the architectural
parameters appropriate to the works represented and to their
creators, the distinctive qualities of the photographic images and
the vantage point of the photographers, as well as the collection
methods of the compiler, Sartoris, his motivation in terms of
photography, and the selective use he made of this material over
a quarter century, under changing historical conditions. Different
prisms are thus superimposed, resulting in variable and sometimes incompatible perceptions, starting of course with the
differing viewpoints of architecture and photography, each with its
specific values and standards of interpretation.
We will not linger at this point over the architectural dimension of
the collection: it is intertwined with the now classic or canonical
history of the international Modern Movement, some parts of
which, it should be said, remain obscure to this day. The collection
is a mirror that of necessity reflects only a partial image; the brief
description offered in the second part of this book documents the
movement’s structure and geography.
Instead we will first concentrate on the photographic component,
which remains to a great extent to be discovered. The lack of

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knowledge about architectural photography is proportional to the
ambivalence with which it has always been burdened, a sort of
constant identity crisis. Architectural photography has traditionally
been structured around three functions with loosely defined
boundaries. As Eric de Maré, one of its first theoreticians,
formulated these functions around 1960, they are “Record” (the
raw document), “Illustration” (having additional aesthetic value),
and “Picture” (autonomous image, independent of any architectural
qualities) 1. Photography’s original documentary mission and its
conditions of production implied an absolute subordination to the
purpose for which it was commissioned. It is hard to find a place
for the Sartoris collection in a history of modern photography,
which was characterized by a quest for autonomy particularly
during the 1930s, the period that mainly interests us, marked as
it was by the expression of the most extreme values of the two
movements involved, Neues Bauen and Neues Sehen, in other
words, the two poles of the avant-garde’s overarching mission
during the 1920s.
For architects, the importance of photography grew at the same
rate as the accelerated international spread of their work. The
intervention of the photographer could have irremediable
consequences, since it often established the definitive image of
the subjects photographed: most of the major achievements of
the Modern Movement were publicized, and are known even
today, through a single sequence, made at a specific moment in
time–in principle, between the end of construction and the arrival
of the users, who could only interfere with the image of the
architecture.
The Sartoris collection provides high-quality raw material for these
different points of view; it should prompt many individual studies
and provide fodder for discussion of the generic and functional
relations between modern photography and modern architecture.
We will limit ourselves here to indicating the most obvious
elements as they appear in the corpus and are revealed in the
uses to which they were put by the compiler or his competitors.
As its second task, this introductory sketch will provide an account
of the major milestones of Sartoris’s undertakings in publishing.
I. Photographing Modern Architecture: Reconstruction of its
History. The first indication of the precariousness of the
architectural photograph is how belatedly its historiography began
to be constituted (in the 1980s) and how sparse and fragmentary
it remains. General accounts of architectural photography, based
on a limited number of canonical situations, logically stress the era
of the 19th century pioneers, who are frequently the pioneers of
photography in general 2. These accounts tend to be studies of a
particular sector or archival collection, and occasionally of
particularly fertile national traditions 3. The first attempt at a
historical synthesis has appeared only recently, as has the first
study targeting the relations between photography and the
Modern Movement 4. Similar targeting characterizes the “theme”
issues of magazines—mainly architectural—which are sporadically
devoted to it: with the galloping inflation typical of the media, they

tend to stress questions related to the representation of current
architecture, to the detriment of a historical perspective 5. As for
monographs on architectural photographers identified as such,
they are mainly concerned with the generation that was active
after 1945. They indicate a process of dated evolution that also
remains to be studied, in which the relationship between architects
and photographers changed, and which continued until the first
signs of the role reversal illustrated in recent years in the United
States by the spectacular careers of photographers such as Ezra
Stoller and particularly Julius Shulman, who has been promoted
as the co-author or even the unique creator of Californian
architectural modernity 6. For the past few years, these changes,
along with the growing legitimacy of architecture as a subject in
various areas of contemporary photography (starting with Bernd
and Hilda Becher, then the Düsseldorf School), has produced,
particularly in Germany, a retrospective re-evaluation of once
ignored “documentary” practices, which are now being reexamined with reference to the Neue Sachlichkeit (Werner Mantz,
Max Baur, Hugo and Karl-Hugo Schmölz, Ruth LauterbachBaenisch, etc.).
Generally speaking, a historiographic outline common to the two
disciplines can serve to describe the progress of architectural
photography, given that the beginnings of photography are closely
connected with the subject of architecture and with classical
methods of representing it, particularly with regard to perspective.
In this area, photography rapidly assumed important heritage
functions (the inventory of monuments), which stimulated the
historicist movement in 19th century architecture and provided it
with models. Photography was also used to illustrate the most
external manifestations of this movement, while providing no real
competition to the graphic or pictorial rendering that was the
exclusive province of architects from the Beaux-Arts tradition. But
in the opposing camp of the “engineers,” it also became a very
effective tool for representing the industrial culture and thus
promoting its visual, material and spatial values. All of these
explicitly instrumental roles would orient and permanently set the
technical procedures and characteristic codes of architectural
photography, as it became a profession 7. Until about 1925, the
pictorialist trend, which had the emancipation of photography as
its goal, generally ignored modern architecture (in its rationalist
definition) as a motif, so it was up to the youthful tradition of
technical and commercial photography to envisage its simple
architectonic virtues and new spatial concepts, at the very time
photographs were beginning to replace drawings and picturesque
renderings in rapidly expanding publications (albums, collections,
magazines) that disseminated architectural images.
Neues Bauen and Neues Sehen, an Ambiguous Relationship.
To continue in the same vein, a schism occurred within the
international avant-garde in the 1920s, when architects and
photographers were working for the first time within a common
framework, governed, at least in theory, by relations of equality.
In their effort to revitalize experimentation with perception and

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depiction in the medium of photography (the various modes of
visual manipulation originating in Dadaism and Constructivism, as
well as certain processes of the Neue Sachlichkeit), the
promoters of the New Vision (Neues Sehen) were supposedly
acting in line with the postulates of the New Architecture (Neues
Bauen). Their revelation and visual absolutization of the most
insignificant material and of the components of the urban context
are well known; László Moholy-Nagy provided a synthesis of this
work in his 1929 essay Von Material zu Architektur 8. But above
all, the avant-garde sought to remedy a shortcoming inherent in
photography, that is, the absence of the factor of time, by
constructing the image so as to suggest, by dynamic tension and
movement, the spatiotemporal continuum that gave substance to
architectural objects in the real world. According to Andreas Haus,
who was writing about the Bauhaus, this culminated in “a new,
artistically productive synthesis between architecture and
photography,” which caused the viewer to experience spatial
organization in all its immediacy, beyond any verbal interpretation.
Raised to the rank of the “proper and ideal medium for the
existence and presentation of architecture,” the New Photography henceforth would present the structure of its subject at the
expense of its materiality and uses, asserting its subjective nature,
its existence independent of matter and time 9.
Despite the convergence of ideas about perception linking avantgarde architects and photographers, and the relative parallelism
of their approaches, such an interpretation goes back to the
experimental program of the New Vision (Neues Sehen) much
more than to the actual practices of architectural photography at
that time and place. It nonetheless underlies most of the historical
literature, which provides only fragmentary, random or abstract
images, without much evidentiary value 10, to illustrate the
presumed homology between the two disciplines.
Now it should be emphasized that the exploratory approach of the
New Photographers (if such a diverse group can be considered a
single entity) was applied only rarely to the real-world material
provided by contemporary architecture. This approach was used
to an even lesser degree for the works constructed by their New
Architecture partners (built objects which had their own manifest
technical and aesthetic values), except, of course, in montages or
collages, which in any case used “conventional” photographic
images. This phenomenon is confirmed by examining the principal
avant-garde journals and magazines of the 1920s, across all
disciplines: in them, the visual experimentation of the Neues
Sehen is clearly distinguished from “photography of modern
architecture,” which appears almost exclusively in its documentary
or professional form. Thus, after the “historical” models de Stijl
and L’Esprit nouveau, there were G(estaltung) in Berlin, Má in
Vienna, Pásmo and later ReD in Prague, and i 10 in Amsterdam.
The same observations are valid to a lesser extent with respect to
the “transitional” publications, henceforth dominated by architects
but attentive to photographic experimentation, which included Das
neue Frankfurt, Praesens in Warsaw, 8 de Opbouw in Amsterdam,
Opbouwen in Bruges and finally AC in Barcelona, in which

experimental practices were limited to the extra-architectural
domain and to advertisements 11. The phenomenon can be verified
at another level in the copious visual material disseminated in
connection with the international exhibition Film und Foto (FiFo)
in Stuttgart in 1929, at the height of the Neues Sehen movement:
the use of contemporary architecture as a theme or pretext was
extremely rare in the exhibition and in the influential publications
that accompanied it, for example, Foto-auge and Es kommt der
neue Fotograf! 12
The “anti-Formalist” reaction and the reassessment of photography as documentation, which later developed in the international modernist milieu, did not have any fundamental effect on
this attitude. During the 1930s, although the leaders of the Neues
Sehen did not renounce their program, most of them (from Man
Ray to Germaine Krull, Maurice Tabard and André Kertész,
considering only the situation in Paris) practiced an informative
type of photography for private and public purposes, including
commissions. Historiography would deliberately relegate this type
of practice to obscurity. But not many of their works in this register
are familiar, including photographs of structures of the Neues
Bauen type, which would seem an excellent forum for their visual
and spatial experimentation. The most emblematic example would
again be Moholy-Nagy, in particular during his stay in Great Britain
in about 1935; he created “mixed” works (documentary and
experimental), published primarily in The Architectural Review,
without claiming that they had any “creative” character 13. This dual
mode of operation is also illustrated by the more discreet example
of the Dutchman Jan Kamman, whose most widely disseminated
“transgressive” image14 superimposes two canonical photos of
built works by Brinkman and Van der Vlugt, who happened to be
the photographer’s principal clients in a promotional practice that
was mainly documentary in nature. As for the position of avowed
representatives of Neue Sachlichkeit such as Renger-Patzsch
and August Sander, who would be rallying points for the
“documentarist” orientation of independent photography, it does
not seem to have led to any rapprochement with the themes of
the New Architecture 15 except in the work of photographers like
Hans Finsler who had close ties to the architectural milieu.
As a final symptom of its indeterminacy, the very notion of
architectural photography was never the subject of discourse or
discussion, insofar as we know, among the avant-garde of the
1920s and 1930s, either among photographers and their critics 16
or in architectural circles. From this standpoint, it would be of
interest to study the attitude of the numerous modernist architects
who practiced photography in one way or another, from Erich
Mendelsohn 17 to Carlo Mollino, including the Basque José Manuel
Aizpúrua, the Brazilian Gregori Warchavchik, the Moravian
Bohuslav Fuchs, the Dane Arne Jacobsen, Richard Neutra and
Giuseppe Pagano, to name only a few distinguished pioneers. In
most cases, we know very little about their photographic
production, which was at times intensive and inventive but seemed
to bypass the architectural motifs of the Modern Movement, and
even their own constructions 18. In addition, the most combative

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From Collection to Encyclopedia

promoters on both fronts refrained from any statements about
photography, for example, the central secretary of CIAM, Sigfried
Giedion, who took many photographs himself and illustrated his
articles with them 19, and Pier Maria Bardi in Milan, who was known
for the montages and snapshots published in his journal
Quadrante. The exception that proves the rule was their colleague
Philip Morton Shand, a London critic and organizer of cultural
events, who in 1934 would make an argument for a conjoining of
Neues Sehen and Neues Bauen in order to appeal to the
subjective creativity of photographers, referring to the theories
and images (very few “architectural,” in the event) of MoholyNagy; of course this was just at the time that Shand, who was a
great collector of images, was supplying his friend Sartoris with
“objective” photographic documents 20. The only recorded contribution by a quasi-official representative of the Modern Movement,
the influential organ of the German Werkbund, Die Form, tended
in contrast to warn against any arbitrariness by photographers in
their representation of architecture—this on the very eve of the
FiFo exhibition organized by the Werkbund to promote the Neues
Sehen 21.
Communication or Instrumentalization? A parallel development, as if in answer to the warning issued by Die Form, was the
sparing use architects made of photographs of their own works
that ultimately fell within the ambit of the Neues Sehen. The
prototypical example, the Bauhaus in Dessau, which was photographed in 1926 by Lucia Moholy in a large series considered
today to be one of the exemplary achievements of the New
Photography applied to the New Architecture, enables us to judge
the ambiguity of the phenomenon. Walter Gropius, who
commissioned the photographs, always refused to publish the
image that came to be the most in demand because of its
transgressive nature: the view of the glass façade of the
workshops from below, all in diagonals and verticals that never
seem to stand up straight, which is also the only photo of its kind.
For all the dynamic nature of their construction (linear tension,
angles, contrasts), the other views in the series, taken with a box
camera on 18 x 24 cm plates and sometimes retouched as well
as reframed at the time of printing, obey the conventions and
procedures established by technical and scientific photography 22.
Given the personality and career path of their creator, the series
later came to be viewed as exemplifying a highly professionalized
practice that was nonetheless inspired by the experiments of the
New Photography; it showed a process of contamination or
assimilation that in varying degrees would mark the activities of
many of her colleagues.
But this case also illustrates, even within the Bauhaus, which was
the center of the institutional meeting of the two disciplines, the
well-differentiated uses that devolved on the one hand upon the
presentation of architecture simply as built objects, and on the
other upon arbitrary visual interpretations of it: the former could
emphasize certain architectural details but were to be used mainly
for cultural propaganda (for example, the views from below of the

balconies of the student housing by Lux Feininger or Irene Bayer,
published more than once by Gropius to illustrate “the Bauhaus
spirit,” or in another area, the monumental montage by Herbert
Bayer at the German Werkbund exhibition in Paris in 1930). The
attitude of the Bauhaus founder seems to have been unfailingly
supportive, and this attitude was probably shared by most of his
colleagues in the Modern Movement as it crystallized during the
second half of the 1920s and was about to enter a phase of
international achievements. We know that this process was
sanctioned in particular by the founding of CIAM, the Congrès
internationaux d’architecture moderne, which would claim to offer a
partnership with groups and nations. Among other consequences,
this new situation changed relations with the Plasticians and other
experimenters of the Neues Sehen everywhere within the old
avant-garde community, heralding the breakdown of groups and
the international network, with the effects of the economic crisis
being the final blow. As for architectural photography, the situation
could only encourage architects in their desire to disseminate an
image that illustrated the implementation of their spatial, technical,
aesthetic and social designs, a promotional image with “evidentiary
value,” of necessity under its designer’s control.
And it was exactly in that form that photography documented the
first accounts celebrating the existence and tangible international
progress of the New Architecture, a fact that will come up again
in relation to Sartoris’s publishing endeavors. The most visually
spectacular examples, in the series Neues Bauen in der Welt in
1930, accentuated the distance between the most arbitrary
processes of the Neues Sehen (the cover montages and to a
lesser extent the graphic layouts of El Lissitzky) and the
conventional nature of the photographs used 23. The same was true
of the process of visual modernization that, starting in 1930,
marked the specialized institutional press all over the world and
disseminated the essential elements of the Modern Movement’s
achievements. With more or less eclectic content, rarely activist,
these journals and magazines would make an increasingly
exclusive and ostentatious use of photography, supported by a
dynamic graphic concept based on a popularized version of avantgarde processes 24. But the informative/documentary vision was
still absolutely dominant, with occasional deviations such as
fragmentation, spatial distortion, and bird’s-eye and worm’s-eye
views, which might be incorporated into a sequence according to
what they added aesthetically, or more exceptionally, designated
as independent “photographic studies”: The Architectural Review,
which, along with Pagano’s Casabella, developed the most
dynamic policy in Europe in regard to the photographic image, offered
an extensive array of them. This process could only accelerate the
technical and aesthetic development of professional architectural
photography. The Sartoris collection provides sufficient evidence
of this all by itself: the quality of the prints, which had often been
mediocre during the heroic phase of the Modern Movement,
improved steadily over the years, in every national context.

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From Collection to Encyclopedia

The Tomb of the Unknown Photographer. Alberto Sartoris
never thought to credit the photographs whose prints he copied,
whether they were signed or not (any signatures visible on the
right side were eliminated by retouching). A blatant illustration of
the relative power of architects and photographers, this attitude
was, in fact, common until late in the 20th century, a function of
various poorly understood historical parameters, starting of course
with the process of professional recognition of photography in
general. Until the 1950s, practices appear to have been inconsistent,
even in the case of specialized publishers in the countries that
were the most advanced in copyright protection, such as Germany,
Great Britain and Switzerland: in the institutional journals
mentioned above, on average only a third of the images were
credited. In the case of the photographers who were credited, it
was clearly because of their privileged status, whether for
contractual reasons or because of their relative fame, which such
acknowledgement could only reinforce. Surveys conducted in a
score of other journals and magazines with a similar profile (in
Scandinavia, France, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Greece, Eastern
Europe and Argentina) indicate much lower proportions. In all
cases and in all national contexts observed, only a very limited
number of photographers received credit 25.
Very few of them, moreover, promoted their services in the
advertising sections for the building trades, which was in fact one
of the first industries to make use of modernist graphic processes.
Modest announcements appeared here and there in the German,
Belgian, Hungarian and Scandinavian press, and were on rare
occasions illustrated in some organs particularly involved in
propagandizing for photography, such as The Architectural Review
(no surprise) and Tér és forma in Budapest. The self-promotional
montage by Zoltán Seidner, one of the main providers of images
for the latter magazine, which was also the house organ of the
Hungarian section of CIAM 26, displayed a characteristic tension
between the social respectability of the technical photographer (as
he, like most of his colleagues, termed himself, thereby demonstrating compatibility with the figure of the New Architect), the role
of the material and the non-transgressive dynamic of the image.
Other indications show that advertising from the photographic
industry (Rolleiflex) could further weaken the position of
professionals by encouraging architects to be responsible for
documenting their work themselves. The effects of this potential
competition were probably minimal; for example, architectural
photography was almost entirely absent from the annual international contests organized and publicized by Rolleiflex.
The policies of architects on this issue can be summed up as an
almost systematic obscuring of it, even when they were arguing
for their own photographs in organizations of the Werkbund type,
which were in principle devoted to the recognition of their rights.
Their silence would contribute to relegating most of the
photographers of their works to total anonymity, even when they
had created unique images or series that were definitively
identified with the paradigmatic subjects they documented. And
the trend was accentuated by the fact that historians clearly held

to the same principle, which continued to govern the great majority
of studies on the Modern Movement, including the principal
monographs of its main protagonists.
In retrospect, the authoritarian but relatively transparent attitude
of Gropius, whose photographers are in principle known, was in
stark contrast to the impenetrability preferred by Le Corbusier, at
least before his collaboration with Lucien Hervé in the late 1940s.
In any event, this concealment was in accordance with Le
Corbusier’s concept of what constituted a photographic commission,
as baldly stated for a demanding practitioner: “When I ask you for
two, four, ten or thirty photographs of my works (and not of yours),
I require of you only a service of an industrial nature.”27 But this
position appears to be in strong contradiction to the architect’s
interest in the actual practice of photography (at least during his
training years) and particularly to the intensive use he made of it
throughout his career. The literature has more than once
emphasized and analyzed his interest, without, however,
discussing the creators or the conditions of production of these
images 28 except in a few individual situations 29. The initial research
into this question, which is very recent, shows the difficulty of
historical reconstruction: attribution of the prints, even in an
architect’s own archives, often remain problematic, and the
position of Le Corbusier’s successive photographers from 1925
to 1945 (Charles Gérard, Georges Thiriet, Marius Gravot,
Boissonnas, René Lévy, Albin Salaün) is difficult to pinpoint, as is
the nature of their relationship with the architect 30. All were
experienced professionals, very active in the artistic and
architectural press in Paris. No technical or aesthetic criterion
provides a conclusive reason for their collaboration or their
eventual rupture with Le Corbusier.
Study of the Sartoris collection enables us—within specific
limits—to lift the anonymity in which the profession in general has
laboured. Two thirds of the original prints in it (about 6000 works)
are signed–with a good deal of variation depending on the period
and national situation–by 402 different photographers (or
agencies). But the great majority of the items in the collection
were produced by fewer than a hundred of them. The technical
quality and the average format of the prints (18 x 24 cm), usually
contact prints, indicate the “traditional” materials and procedures
used (whole-plate camera, rectifier/enlarger), while their physical
state, and in some cases a publisher’s copyright on the back,
indicate their primary and nearly exclusive purpose: as copies for
use by the press. In many cases, the presumed original state, the
raw photo, has been modified by retouching the print (possibly
after a touch-up brush was used on the negative), and indications
of reframing may also be visible.
Besides the questionable objectivity of photographic documents
in general, these data make the photographer’s control of the
process a relative matter at all stages of the process, and there is
no possibility of specifically attributing responsibility for the
successive corrections to the printer, compiler, photo-engraver
…or even the architect, for these prints reveal nothing about the
amount of interference by the architect, or his decision-making

Gli Elementi dell’architettura
funzionale, 1932, book jacket.

power, either before or after the photograph was actually taken.
The documentation that accompanies the collection shows that
Sartoris acquired its components essentially from his fellow
architects (who controlled the choice of prints but were not
necessarily the initiators of the commission, which might have
been the press), sometimes from another compiler 31 or possibly
from a publisher. No requests seem to have been addressed
specifically to photographers, however; their names and the
quality of their work are scarcely ever mentioned in the surviving
correspondence.
The brief descriptions of the collection in the “national” sections
provide further evidence of the very diverse conditions and
methods of Sartoris’s undertaking, temporally and geographically.
They include the principal data about the nature of the documents
and what distinguishes them technically and aesthetically, as well
as the photographers who have been identified, and their
positions. The limits of the available information, and in some cases
its total absence, will be evident. Ideally, research on each of the
locations would provide welcome information.
Most of the photographers are identified by their names alone.
Only rarely can these names be recognized as belonging to the
general history of photography, in its different hierarchical levels,
national and international: they include only a few great names
connected with various trends in New Photography, such as Man
Ray, Renger-Patsch, André Kertész, Germaine Krull, and, more
peripherally, John Havinden in London, Willy Kessels in Brussels,
Heinrich Iffland in Helsinki and Ralph Steiner in New York,
alongside isolated works of lesser visual power. The more
substantial contributions of such photographers as Hans Finsler
and Jan Kamman are evidence of a method of rigorous
functionalization directly derived from the Neue Sachlichkeit in
terms of material and spatial definition and construction of the
image. But analogous characteristics generally apply to the work
of many other professionals who emerged from the technical and
commercial tradition and conducted their business under that
banner. This also applies to the photographers who are well
represented in the collection, who are also the most active in the
different regional contexts (beyond which, prior to the 1950s, their
area of activity rarely extended) and the most widely recognized
(although scarcely ever to the point of justifying the interest of
historiographers): Marc Vaux and Albin Salaün in Paris, Max
Krajewsky and especially Arthur Köster in Berlin 32, Heinrich Klette
in Breslau, Martin Gerlach in Vienna, Rudolf de Sandalo in
Czechoslovakia, Zoltán Seidner in Budapest, the Crimella agency
in Milan, Vasari in Rome, Ferdinando Barsotti in Florence and
Mazzoletti in Como, Evert M. Van Ojen in the Hague, Mark O. Dell
and H.L. Wainwright, Herbert Felton and Sidney Newbery in
London, Rading in Copenhagen, Carl Gustav Rosenberg in
Stockholm, Anders B. Wilse in Oslo, Gustaf Welin in Turku, and
in the Americas, Arthur Luckhaus in Los Angeles, Hedrich &
Blessing in Chicago, and Ugo Zanella in São Paulo. The 1940s
would see the emergence of some particularly noteworthy figures,
such as Guillermo Zamora and, soon after, Armando Salas

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Portugal in Mexico, while in Europe, the younger generation would
diversify and personalize its visual and technical approach, as
shown by Peter Pitt in London, Heinrich Heidersberger in
Braunschweig, Aage Strüwing in Copenhagen, Hans Finsler’s
students in Switzerland (Michael Wolgensinger, Bernhard
Moosbruger) and particularly Lucien Hervé in France and Francisco
Català Roca in Catalonia. And the postwar context would show,
nearly everywhere, the unifying effects of an “American model”
embodied by Robert Damora, Ezra Stoller and Julius Shulman,
who gave the genre its first extra-architectural legitimacy.
Beyond certain dominant conventions at various levels of
interpretation (shooting angles, lighting, contrasts; decontextualization, defunctionalization, intemporality), the eventual
shared languages used by these photographers remain to be
defined, as well as their variants and the individual departures from
them, without forgetting their specific interrelations with the
architecture represented. But it is important to mention the
photographers’ remarkable willingness to create images of
objects of very diverse natures and purposes, sometimes
decidedly “incorrect” from a Modernist standpoint. This is
demonstrated, independently of those Germans who placed their
vision at the service of the Third Reich (including Köster and
Krajewsky), by the photographers chosen by Le Corbusier in the
1930s. For example, Marius Gravot, the most notable of them in
particular for the lyrical dimension of his work, produced the
canonical sequences of the Pavillon Suisse at the Cité Universitaire
and especially of the Villa Savoye, but was also a prolific illustrator
of the modernized Beaux-Arts tradition and Art Deco for the
specialized press. The same eclecticism characterized his most
active colleagues in Paris, such as Marc Vaux (the works of André
Lurçat and Mallet-Stevens), Georges Thiriet (Guévrékian,
Chareau, maquettes by Le Corbusier) and the veteran Albin
Salaün (Michel Roux-Spitz, Lurçat and Mallet-Stevens), as well
as Boissonnas in Geneva and Paris and the Chevojon studio,
successor to the legendary Durandelle workshop in 1886 and a
reservoir of industrial photography. Despite a half-hearted
technical modernization dictated mainly by the stock market
crash, none of these veritable institutions of Parisian photography
could be identified with the New Vision 33.
II. Context of the Elementi dell’architettura funzionale. The
collecting and dissemination efforts in which Alberto Sartoris was
involved come fully within the context sketched above, and his
position with respect to the photographic image and its uses
reveals the ambivalence that marked many other aspects of his
career as an architect and cultural activist. This career path is far
from having been studied exhaustively 34, in particular those parts
of it having to do with Sartoris’s publishing undertakings, from
their origins to the reception they received. This work will indicate
the principal milestones in that career.
Origins. Various factors came together to turn the young
architect, who trained in Geneva and then in Turin from 1922 to

1926, toward a career as a cultural intermediary and propagandist,
which extended far beyond the field of architecture. These factors
included the continual uncertainty of his “trans-national” situation,
which he would transform into an interface between Italy and
Switzerland, and more broadly, between French and German
cultures. There was also the primacy generally given to architectural
drawings and images, which were considered to be independent
works in the face of a practice deemed a priori to be disappointing.
His first articles for the Zurich monthly Das Werk date from 1926
and his activity as an organizer of exhibitions (artistic and
architectural) from 1927; these were the first milestones in a
network of relationships that he would continue to develop in the
international modernist milieu.
Historiography generally dates the origin of the Elementi to the
founding meeting of CIAM (Congrès internationaux d’architecture
moderne) at La Sarraz in June 1928. To all intents and purposes,
this meeting was of crucial importance to Sartoris, who was the
junior member of the group and whose participation was due
primarily to his relations with Hélène de Mandrot, who initiated and
hosted CIAM. First, it represented a chance to join, on an equal
footing, a coterie that presented itself as the supranational elite of
architectural modernity, and to take part in an event that confirmed
the official emergence of the Modern Movement. The only
authorized representative of Italy in the absence of Carlo Rava,
the leader of Gruppo 7, the newcomer Sartoris spoke up only
once, to propose the free publication by an Italian publisher of a
“book that should conclude the conference.” In the confusion that
characterized CIAM’s information policy, the suggestion was not
followed up, but Sartoris did become the interim delegate to the
CIAM executive committee on construction (CIRPAC) 35.
Sartoris’s proposal for a publication was actually an addition to a
plan formulated even before the La Sarraz meeting, in particular
in letters to the Brussels architect Victor Bourgeois, from whom
Sartoris requested photos for a “book on urban planning”; in July,
an equally “urgent” request was addressed to Le Corbusier with
respect to “a volume on European architecture” to be published in
Turin under Edoardo Persico, who had also been suggested as
the publisher of the CIAM book 36. These are the first indications
of a project and a documentary quest that would primarily involve
the members of CIAM whom Sartoris had met at La Sarraz and
then at the Frankfurt Congress in 1929: this circumstance would
determine the profile—and the primary legitimacy as incontrovertibly
modern—of the collection and its use, which would symbolically
end three decades later with the undermining of CIAM as an
institution, as we will see.
The project proceeded more generally from a group dynamic of
bringing together the achievements of the Modern Movement,
and disseminating them internationally, which had already
manifested itself in various ways, starting in 1925 with the failed
launch of a international modernist association (AMI) initiated by
the activist Victor Bourgeois, with the exhibition in Nancy by the
Comité Paris–Nancy in 1926, and with the establishment of the
significant and enduring Weissenhofsiedlung the following year in

Stuttgart. The first CIAM itself was supposed to be accompanied
by a large exhibition of photographs, “L’habitation nouvelle,” in
Lausanne, which its initiator, Swiss writer and critic Paul Budry,
had to abandon for lack of cooperation and—tacitly—of ad hoc
documents from the architects he approached 37.
References. This context was also marked by the proliferation,
starting in Germany, of illustrated inventories of international
modernism, which would be used by Sartoris as reference
models. Whatever the level of compliance with the graphic
principles of the Neues Sehen and the relatively conventional
nature of the photographic documents used (and very exceptionally
credited), they had as a common denominator the primacy of the
visual over the verbal 38. The principal examples of these inventories
have remained in Sartoris’s library, starting with Internationale
Architektur by Gropius in 1925, a Bilderbuch that initiated and
remained emblematic of the Bauhausbücher series, designed by
Moholy-Nagy in a format that was dynamic but not particularly
transgressive, as were the exterior shots which exclusively
comprise the work and which the author, moreover, described in
his brief introduction as insufficient 39. In the same panoramic style
are Adolf Behne’s Der moderne Zweckbau (Munich, 1926, in a
more traditional format); Bruno Taut’s Bauen. Der neue Wohnbau
(Berlin, 1927, designed to be a didactic work, with an inventive
photographic layout by Johannes Molzahn); Ludwig Hilberseimer’s
panorama of visual popularization Internationale Baukunst (1927,
in the very widely disseminated series of Baubücher from publisher
Julius Hoffmann in Stuttgart, which would include a dozen
publications); and, also mainly consisting of photographs, Bauen
in Frankreich by Roger Ginsburger and El Lissitzky, in the Neues
Bauen in der Welt series mentioned above, published in 1930 in
Vienna by Anton Schroll under the direction of Joseph Gantner.
Sartoris’s library also contained volumes of a more subtle kind,
such as M.S.A. (Mezinárodní soudobá architektura/L’architecture
internationale d’aujourd’hui) by Karel Teige, published in Prague
in the spring of 1929, the only “supra-national” work in an
ambitious quadrilingual series with a systematically described
mission, in which the division by countries was complemented by
analytical texts, while the role of the photography, which in rare
cases was experimental, was less crucial because of the detailed
graphic information. There was also the second edition of the
most monumental of these works, Die Baukunst der neuesten
Zeit by Gustav Adolf Platz, issued by the academic publishing
house Propyläen in Berlin (1930, first edition in 1927), with an ad
hoc profile and presentation: 200 pages of historical analysis
preceded 500 plates, sometimes prepared by the gravure process,
some in color, illustrating a wide spectrum of contemporary
production and its sources. In addition, there were the traditional
typological collections consisting of gravure plates, henceforth to
be devoted to promoting modernist achievements, for example,
the major series L’art international d’aujourd’hui by the publisher
Charles Moreau in Paris in 1929, which claimed to be warranted
because of its new contributors (including Le Corbusier, Lurçat

and Chareau). Less spectacularly, the formula of the international
visual inventory also marked the theoretical works of certain
leaders of the Modern Movement such as André Lurçat
(Architecture, Paris, 1929) and Huib Hoste (Van Wonen en
Bouwen, Bruges, 1930); the copies of these works in Sartoris’s
collection contain personal dedications.
The trend in publishing was logically limited to the places in which
the Modern Movement was most active. An initial inventory of
pioneers, arguments and references was thus established, and
would become historic. The trend also reached a saturation point,
which the young critic Philip Johnson 40 noticed in Germany as
early as 1930 while he and Henry Russel Hitchcock were
preparing the first inventory of this type for use in the United
States: the exhibition “Modern Architecture” at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York in 1932, provided with an exemplary
catalogue (also in the Sartoris archives) and accompanied by the
soon-to-be-legendary work The International Style. The exhibition
and its ancillary publications coincided exactly with the first edition
of the Elementi and were a preferred source for comparison with
Sartoris’s work, less for the relatively sparing and equally classical
use of images than for the definition of the nature and objectives
of the Modern Movement, which in New York were essentially
reduced to their formal dimension.
Fruition. Sartoris’s anthology may seem a latecomer in the
international context, but it is less so if we consider the relatively
peripheral conditions, the obstacle-ridden emergence of the
Modern Movement and the conflicts at work in the architectural
milieu in Italy. Whatever the internal (Italian) issues, all of Sartoris’s
publishing and documentary collection activities were based in
Switzerland. The collection grew rapidly and was used to illustrate
various articles in the Italian and then the international press. It may
also have suggested to Sartoris a gigantic project for an international
exhibition of modern architecture—to be a world premiere—which
he proposed in 1930 to his future preface-writer Pier Maria Bardi,
at that time director of the Galleria di Roma: it was to include the
work of 300 architects from 27 countries, presented in six sections
in the form of photographic enlargements, and would have required
no less than 3000 running metres of space! Implementation of
this utopian project would quickly be declared premature 41.
As for the publication of the anthology, it was announced on
several occasions as “imminent,” usually under the title Antologia
della nuova architettura europea, as early as April 1929, in the
magazine Città futurista, co-edited by Sartoris and his Plastician
friend Fillia. In fact it was the latter who produced the first work
of this type in Italy, La Nuova Architettura (Turin, UTET, 1931),
“the first book that presents the new construction forms according
to their aesthetic value and their functional importance,” to echo
the indulgent description by Sartoris, who contributed two texts
and 100 photographs, but later declared (in private) “rather poor
because of the discordant choice of the documents”42. The
collaboration of the two men continued in 1935 with Gli Ambienti
della Nuova Architettura, devoted to interiors 43.

Fillia’s first album was intended as an artist’s book, with a refined
graphic layout—at first glance, not very consistent with the
Futurist aesthetic the author espoused—that notably experimented
with varied positioning and scale for the images, which in some
cases were spectacular and were reproduced by gravure printing.
Consisting in part of the same photographs, Elementi differs from
it in the much larger volume of iconographic material, in its more
orthodox selection of subjects, and in its more classical and above
all systematic presentation. The formula seemed to fit both Sartoris’s
aspirations and the tradition of the Milan publishing house Ulrico
Hoepli, founded in 1870, generalist but with a mainly scientific
and technical orientation. In 1932, the catalogue of Hoepli’s
general technical section included more than 800 titles, including
about a hundred in the category “Science of construction and
architecture”: these are essentially technical manuals and treatises.
The circumstances that led Sartoris to the Hoepli publishing house
in 1931 are not known. Polemical, ideologically and aesthetically
weighty, his work would at first glance seem incongruous in that
setting, even if the publisher stressed its practical aspect, useful
for “any builder.” The only other representative of the Modern
Movement in Italy on the Hoepli list was Enrico Griffini, with a work
that was in fact technical in nature, Costruzione razionale della
casa, published the same year. Sartoris was able to exploit, in form
and subject, the tension between activism and encyclopedic
ambitions. However, in 1933, Ulrico Hoepli rejected another
project by the young architect, entitled Pittura e scultura moderna,
because, for one thing, it implied a critical approach deemed to
be dangerous, rather than a scientific type of collection. But the
Hoepli publishing house, particularly after the death of its founder
Ulrico Hoepli and his replacement in 1935 by his son Carlo, would
continue until the war to publish numerous other promotional
works devoted to “modern architecture,” partly in connection with
the Milan Triennale, often similar in presentation and written by
authors with their origins in the same milieu: in 1941, when the
third edition of Elementi was published, there would be some 15
such works, including three volumes by Agnoldomenico Pica
(Nuova architettura italiana in 1937, Nuova architettura nel
mondo in 1938, Architettura moderna in Italia in 1941) and
various generic or typological inventories by such authors as
Roberto Aloi, Mario Labò Piero Bottoni and Giuseppe Pagano.
Structure. Physically, Elementi stood out from all its international
predecessors because of its generous quarto format and volume
and the quality of the paper, linen binding, simple typography and
printing (by the Milan printer Stucchi). These indications of good
manufacture and visual comfort were also evident in the iconographic component, and therefore in the photographs, as in the
care shown in the photogravure reproductions (by Zincografica
Monzani) and in the ample format (up to 22 x 16 cm), enhanced
by a layout that usually presented a single image per page.
The work consisted first of a sporadically illustrated text (56 pages
out of the 540 in the first edition), then the “panoramic synthesis
of modern architecture” that was the centerpiece of the work. The

34 | 35

From Collection to Encyclopedia

“300 illustrations” mentioned to Le Corbusier in June 193144 would
grow to 676 within a few months. The same structure was maintained in the three editions, each larger than the last only because
of the additional images (1135 in the 950-page 1941 edition).
As well as a dedication, successively to Annibale Rigotti (Sartoris’s
first teacher in Turin) and to the writer Paul Budry, the volumes
contain a preface by Le Corbusier in the form of a letter dated 10
June 1931. It is as ambiguous as it is brief. Asked to give his
imprimatur, Le Corbusier preferred to question the pertinence of
the terms in the title of the work: “rational” architecture, as it was
then called, then “functional” (while “elements” referred to the
Dutch tradition of Mondrian and Van Doesburg). In light of the
infinite aesthetic and social mission Le Corbusier envisaged for
architecture, he deplored the restrictive definition. This preface
would be used as late as 1948—in this last case in its original
French version—in the first volume of the Encyclopédie de
l’architecture nouvelle. In the 1932 edition, it was followed by a
general presentation of the issues of modern architecture by an
Italian journalist from Geneva, Carlo Ciucci, which was replaced
in 1935 by a more polemical and personalized text by Pietro Maria
Bardi. To these was added an unequivocal paean of praise (collaudo)
by academy member Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who placed
Sartoris’s undertaking within the great tradition of Futurism.
As for the author’s general introduction, which is found in all three
editions, it consists of eight chapters that present the context (“the
mechanical civilization”), the arguments, the theoretical justifications,
the systems (in particular originating in the movements of the
artistic avant-garde), the methods and materials, and finally the
“formulas” of an architecture alternatively termed “modern,”
“rational” and “functional.” Divided between an immanent concept
of architecture and the primarily technical and social issues
contingent on recent changes to it, the arguments, in which
intentionally rhetorical generalization predominates over the use
of examples, recapitulate a broad range of international debates
from the preceding decade. Its ambivalent nature has frequently
been described, as has its strategic dimension (given Sartoris’s
extra-territorial position, as it were, in the context of Fascist Italy),
based as it was on the tension between the affirmation of national
or more broadly “Latin” primacy and the new architecture’s
aspiration to universality 45.
The “panoramic synthesis” in images offered a completely
different version of the same raw material. Presented in “national”
sections, necessarily of unequal weight but classified in alphabetical
order to provide a semblance of objectivity, it suggested the
triumphant internationalization of modernist models. From this
standpoint, the panorama seemed much more extensive than all
those that preceded it on the same terrain (such as the volumes
by Platz, Hilberseimer and Teige): 25 countries (and 140 architects)
were represented in 1932, and they would increase to 57
countries (and 190 architects) in 1941, a figure that was certainly
boosted by a world situation in which geopolitical divisions were
proliferating, but that also fit the cumulative rationale of the author.
This rationale quickly re-established a dual hierarchy: between

Page from Gli Elementi
dell’architettura funzionale.

and within geographical locations. The resulting recognition of
various national and personal achievements would evolve over the
course of the decade. It reflected the decline of the German
movement, which had logically been favored in 1932 and then
reduced to its historical dimension after the advent of the Nazis,
and the stagnation of its French opposite number, as well as the
emergence of new centers of reference such as Great Britain, to
all intents and purposes absent in 1932, and particularly Italy, of
course, which was already over-represented. On a personal level,
only a limited number of protagonists would see their position
confirmed or established, starting with such founding figures as
Gropius, Le Corbusier and Oud, and later including Aalto, Neutra
and Terragni, not to mention Sartoris himself.
These considerations of status were evidence of a clear hierarchy
of authority that continues to be an organizing factor in our image
of the Modern Movement today. They take on additional
significance in regard to the various national situations analyzed
later in the description of the collection, which contain, case by
case, basic information that is useful for an understanding of the
system of selecting subjects and images and of their continuance
or replacement in successive editions; also useful are the texts
describing or justifying Sartoris’s choices. Of course, these data
are also relevant to the partially common corpus in the volumes of
the post-war Encyclopédie, which was constructed according to
the same model as Elementi despite some replacement of an
activist stance by a historical or even historiosophic interpretation,
as the change in title forcibly suggests.
In all the volumes, the presentation of the images was organized
according to the principle of accumulation and within the same
homogeneous framework (with undifferentiated formats and
layouts). While graphic representations were still numerous in the
first edition of Elementi, starting in 1935 photographs would
predominate in a proportion of 80%, irregularly interspersed with
drawings and plans. Independently of their selection by the
compiler, who eventually published about a third of the prints in
his collection, these photos reflected the qualitative characteristics
of the collection which have already been discussed. Their primary
effectiveness stemmed from their quantity, their generous size
(which was used in its full width, with horizontal prints being
reproduced on their sides) and even their apparent repetitiveness.
In fact, just as the number of constructions deemed worthy of
dissemination tended to increase from one edition to the next, so
did the number of photos documenting each subject, culminating
in the Encyclopédie. Rare or very limited in the German panoramas
of the 1920s described above, these extended sequences were
another distinctive feature of Sartoris’s anthologies which
demonstrated an intent to show as many aspects of a building as
possible, no matter whether this produced an effect of redundancy
reinforced by the regularity of the format and the central
placement 46. It was as though, beyond the “evidentiary value”
inherent in photography, this cumulative principle, already tried
and tested extensively and in many forms by Modernism and
especially Futurism, was being used in an attempt to strengthen

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From Collection to Encyclopedia

photography’s authority and force as evidence still further. When
the book was launched at the Galleria del Milione in Milan, a
particularly dynamic synthesis of it was provided by the publicity
montages by Gino Ghiringhelli and Luigi Figini; thousands of
copies of them were distributed in the form of tracts.
Dissemination and Reception. The first edition of Elementi
was published in the spring of 1932, and the original printing of
1400 copies was quickly sold out. A year later, a second edition
was already under consideration and Ulrico Hoepli was making
suggestions about it: limiting the number of reproductions to
under 600, eliminating works without value, replacing planned
works by photos of completed projects, adding plans and crosssections that the intended audience (“builders”) would find useful,
reducing the disproportionate amount of space devoted to Italy
and particularly to the author. From Hoepli’s standpoint, these
were the preconditions for the work becoming a “classic of the
genre”47. Sartoris complied, more or less, at least in the second
edition-; in the event, the volume would practically double in size
in 1941 and the Italian representation would increase even more.
There was also discussion (with no practical consequences) of a
French version, then a British one; the latter question would be
raised again in 1934 via Raymond McGrath, on the basis of the
second Italian edition then in preparation 48. The 1350 copies of
that second edition, published in the spring of 1935, sold at a
slower rate, and its sales did not justify the ultimate monumental
version until 1941, after the war was under way. In October 1942,
the major part of the printing of 1800 copies escaped the
destruction of the Hoepli inventory in a bombing raid by the Allies,
but most of the printing plates were destroyed and had to be
redone for later editions.
Sales of the book were more than honorable, given the state of
crisis and then war that marked Italy during the decade, but it does
not seem to have received the enthusiastic reception the author
expected. Despite its launch with great fanfare at the Galleria del
Milione, the center of activity of the Milan avant-garde, Sartoris
complained to his confidant Bardi in particular about the indifference
of the regional milieu, which practically amounted to a boycott. It
is true that accounts of the first edition were fairly sparse in Italy
as elsewhere, and the situation was repeated even more strikingly
in 1935 49. Bardi brought up the claim of a conspiracy of silence
in his introduction to this second edition (pp. 3–5), to stress even
more forcefully the fate of the Elementi internationally, and its
multiple role of revealing (particularly in Italy), confirming, and
providing a reference for “contemporary principles.” There are
similar descriptions in certain letters, for example from Sartoris’s
future competitor in Zurich, Alfred Roth 50, and in most of the
accounts that have been found, usually from peripheral locations 51.
In Paris, however, the editor of L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui gave
a summary execution to “this book about which people have been
talking so much” (a way of confirming its renown): “an uninteresting
sequence of photographs, almost all of which have been known
for a long time, without any logical order, without comments,

Luigi Figini and Gino Ghiringelli.
Photomontage for the launch of Gli
Elementi, 1932.

without plans. A monotonous, wearisome parade.” The structure,
classification method, selection of subjects and “confused,
prolix”52 theoretical statements were all discredited. From the
standpoint of the opulent Paris magazine, the argument that it had
all been seen before was not irrelevant: during its first two years
of activity, L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui had in effect published
practically all the recent constructions reproduced by Sartoris—
and many others besides, given the magazine’s eclectic profile—
with in general the same photographs but with more complete
sequences and a more varied layout. But that argument blurs the
distinction between the theoretical functions of periodicals, which
are supposed to disseminate current events, and works of
synthesis, which are dedicated to the canonization of models.
The impact and the reference function of Elementi and the
Encyclopédie still call for analysis from that last perspective. It was
difficult to come to a unanimous conclusion about the anthologies
during the 1930s, when despite a resurgence of traditionalism
that was supposed to disqualify the modernist paradigms, their
growing institutionalization went hand in hand with their
popularization and diversification. The Italian anthologies published
by Hoepli (and other publishers) at the time provide evidence of
this, as do those designed by Sartoris’s friends and colleagues in
London, including Raymond McGrath (Twentieth Century House,
1934) and particularly Francis R.S. Yorke, the author of three shorter
profiles for the publisher The Architectural Press: The Modern
House (devoted to single-family dwellings, with three
successively larger editions from 1934 to 1937), The Modern Flat
(multiple-unit housing, 1937, with Frederick Gibberd) and The Modern
House in England (1937).
These publications, which attested to a strong market demand
even at that date, also showed certain analogies in structure
(division by country) and similarities in details (even the
typography) to the model of the Elementi, not to mention the
photographs that Sartoris and Yorke frequently exchanged.
However, the approach adopted by the Londoner is analytic rather
than cumulative, despite the large number of architects and
subjects represented (between 50 and 100, depending on the
work, for the limited period from 1924 or 1927 to 1937), as is
the method of presentation of the constructions and their images,
which is systematic and visually diversified, and includes comments.
This approach prefigured a type of international inventory that
would soon make its mark as an alternative model; an example is
Alfred Roth’s trilingual Die Neue Architektur, published in 1940
and based on a detailed analysis of 20 subjects exemplifying the
past decade, according to a list of factors: functional organization,
technical achievement, economic factors, and aesthetic synthesis 53.
Reorientation and Continuity. It seemed that this development
would undermine the value of the formula used by the Elementi.
Sartoris himself responded to the new situation with a work that
was entirely different in nature, Introduzione alla architettura
moderna, published in 1943, again by Hoepli (the manuscript was
ready for printing by the summer of 1942), which would have two

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From Collection to Encyclopedia

subsequent editions, the last in 1949. These were thick, smallformat volumes, mainly discursive, in which the author, in a dozen
chapters, developed the different topics he had first discussed in
his works in the 1930s. The photographic illustrations, usually
from the Elementi and therefore from the collection, were still
copious (151 plates out of 363 pages in the 1943 and 1944
editions; 190 out of 575 pages in 1949), and often in the form
of a full page facing the text. Photographs were also used for the
covers of each edition, with emblematic views of Scharoun’s
Schminke House, then Terragni’s Frigerio House, and finally the
photographer Ben Schnall’s view from below—of course not
credited—of the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building by
Howe and Lescaze.
Sartoris did not consider abandoning his “panoramic” undertaking
in the new post-war context. In 1945, he resumed his quest for
documents in the international community; he had in mind a fourth
edition of the Elementi, which continued to be so named in
documents until 1946. We do not know the specific circumstances
that led him, once again with Carlo Hoepli, to reorient the project
toward the formula of the Encyclopédie, in French, in which the
presumed universality of the new architecture would be divided
into broad geocultural zones described in terms of “order” and
“spirit.” Its precise history remains to be established and
interpreted, in the light of new conditions in the publishing market
and the field of architecture, but also in respect to Sartoris’s
personal situation and the development of his ideas.
With 520 pages and 510 illustrations, the first volume, subtitled
“Ordre et esprit méditerranéens,” was published in 1948 in 4000
copies, still with the original preface by Le Corbusier and an
introduction by the French-Swiss poet Edmond Humeau, who
presented the work as complementing the Elementi. Only nine
countries are represented (very unevenly), including Switzerland,
Austria and Hungary, with Italy having a crushing advantage with
half of the images and almost all the new documentation of the
decade. This fact makes it easier to understand the need for a
second, much larger edition (683 pages), which appeared only in
1957; the new iconographic material was, however, again
essentially to the advantage of Italy, as well as the flourishing new
architecture of Catalonia. Completion of the subsequent volumes,
which were announced immediately, would take over a decade.
“Ordre et climat américains” (over 800 illustrations) would appear
in 1954, before the “Nordic” volume, with 740 illustrations,
published in 1957. The jackets of the four works show a classically
placed photograph of a work characteristic of Le Corbusier in its
design, or, in the case of the Nordic volume, referring to the
tradition of Mies van der Rohe.
All the volumes had the same organization, with a partially
illustrated introduction of 130 to 150 pages, then an unbroken
flood of images, without a breath taken between the individual
parts of the illustrated national series and no headers to indicate
their identity, as was already true of the Elementi. The effort to
render the photographs homogeneous, probably intended to
emphasize their unity within a shared “trans-national” order,

Double page from Francis R. S. Yorke.
The Modern House, London, 1937.

Francis R.S. Yorke and Frederick
Gibberd. The Modern Flat, London,
1937, book jacket.

reached such a peak that it left the reader with a hazy picture of
the evolution of the architectural qualities of the works photographed, which were sometimes separated by a half century, and
blurred the technical and aesthetic changes in the photographs
themselves, as manifested during the 1940s and 1950s in the
United States, Mexico and Catalonia especially. Whether deliberate
or not, this approach was consistent with the introductory remarks
of the Encyclopédie, which were above all intended to demonstrate
the principle of continuity that connected authentically new
architecture with the classical (Latin) sources of rationalism.
The critical fate of the Encyclopédie, even more than that of the
Elementi, is not well known, but the book seems to have elicited
a mixture of indulgent approval in general, along with acerbic
criticism of its ideological positions 54. We must remember that the
last three volumes appeared in a context of crisis and challenge
to the postulates of the Modern Movement, as evidenced in
particular by the decline and death throes of CIAM, so closely
associated with the genesis of the Elementi project; CIAM would
be officially disbanded in 1959. It was logical that this state of affairs
would also mark the end of Sartoris’s “historical” collection and its
dissemination. He would continue the latter activity on a lesser scale
until 1960 in the Swiss annual Architecture-Formes-Fonctions.
From then on, his great anthologies would function as a vast
inventory of high-quality images, drawn upon by many researchers,
just at the time the historiography of the Modern Movement as a
well-defined phenomenon was being established: one of its first
proponents, Leonardo Benevolo, is said to have made ample use
of these works in his History of Modern Architecture 55, resulting
in rapid worldwide dissemination of the images through the many
translations of his book.
It was natural that historical distance, added to the increasing rarity
of these books on the market, would subsequently amplify the
significance of the Elementi—and particularly of the first edition—
as a specifically paradigmatic work, instead of as the comprehensive survey the Encyclopédie was intended to be. This status
would receive final confirmation in the late 1980s, with Sartoris’s
several abortive attempts at republication with various international
publishing houses. These efforts would conclude with Taschen’s
publishing a volume that, significantly, combined the Elementi (for
the images) with another work of the same period, The International
Style by Hitchcock and Johnson (for its stylistic interpretation of
the Modern Movement). The original qualities of the photographs,
reproduced from photogravures published for the most part by
Sartoris, were effaced in order to create a pure effigy, fetishized
and disembodied. Despite a suit brought by Sartoris, this new
work, Functional Architecture: The International Style, 1925–1940,
would become in its turn the internationally accepted inventory of
reference 56.
Epilogue: Sartoris and Photography, Paradox or Inevitability?
None of the available accounts of Sartoris’s publications, and no
other personal documents by or addressed to him, report any kind
of attention—other than documentary—to the quality of the

thousands of photographs he collected, compiled, conserved and
published. Sartoris, who at times took souvenir photos, entrusted
the photographing of his own architecture to good local
photographers (Emile Gos and Jechiel Feldstein in Lausanne,
Oscar Darbellay in Martigny), who were occasionally motivated by
a desire to experiment (for example, Grete Hubacher, connected
with the Neues Bauen and Neues Sehen movements in Zurich,
in the case of the Cercle de l’Ermitage in Epesses). Sartoris
published only a very limited number of views—never transgressive
—out of these several hundred photographs, mostly unfamiliar
and to date never studied.
In a more general sense, there is no evidence, either in his many
writings or in his own behavior, that he had any real interest in
photography as a medium. On various occasions, however, he had
a close relationship with some outstanding practitioners of visual
experimentation. His collection, undertaken at the time of the first
CIAM in 1928, was built at the apogee of the Neues Sehen. In
1929, moreover, he himself participated, without much motivation,
in one of its landmark manifestations, the Congrès international
du Cinéma indépendant (International Congress of Independent
Filmmakers), along with such eminent filmmakers as Sergei
Eisenstein and Hans Richter. At the Maison des artistes at La
Sarraz, he rubbed shoulders with other emblematic activists,
starting with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in 1930 57. The next influences on
Sartoris were the Milanese environment of the Galleria del Milione,
the remarkable visual inventiveness of Persico and Pagano—the
latter a genuine adversary of Sartoris on a personal level—as
heads of Casabella, and then the equal inventiveness shown by
his confidant Bardi in Quadrante, not to mention the “paraphotographic” works of Luigi Veronesi of the Como group. All of these
activities were documented in Sartoris’s library (in the absence of
any work specifically devoted to the New Photography other than
the Bauhausbuch by Moholy-Nagy entitled Malerei, Fotografie,
Film) by publications or magazines such as Campo grafico which
were at the leading edge of European graphic design. They seem
to have had no effect on his grasp or use of the photographic
image, either in relation to architecture or otherwise.
Nor did photography have a place in the “contemporary museum”
whose ideal organization he described for the preparatory congress
organized on this topic in La Sarraz in 1931, except under the
specialized heading of “filmism” or in the very general category of
the “new viewpoint”58. But the major evidence of his indifference
is his publishing activity, including his anthologies: the medium of
photography never attained the status of the “modern art” whose
organic communication with architecture he emphasized and
illustrated constantly. To him, modern art consisted of painting
(Cubism, Futurism, “constructive” abstraction originating in NeoPlasticism and Suprematism, and eventually Pittura Metafisica),
occasionally sculpture, and even various forms of para-architectural
spatial environments which could marginally use photographic
material, such as the work of his friend Marcello Nizzoli.
The case of the eleven prints that Moholy-Nagy sent Sartoris in
1936 for publication in the Elementi shows the situation in a

nutshell. They include a close-up of the Space-Light Modulator,
two photograms, two views of stage sets and an abstract
photographic “Construction” dating from 1935, material that is
exemplary of the development of his “photo-spatial” work and was
chosen for that reason by this most consistent Neues Sehen
experimenter, to be used in a Neues Bauen anthology. Relegated
to the back of a cupboard, they were neither published nor
included in the collection of architectural photographs 59.
Was Sartoris’s attitude, like that of many of his colleagues when
faced with photography’s potential for spatial expression, in stark
contrast to his massive use of it as a tool in his work as a
propagandist? There is yet another factor to trouble the waters:
as interested as he was in the graphic representation of space,
Sartoris owed the second aspect of his international reputation to
his intensive practice of axonometry, according to a system that
crystallized at the same time as his undertaking to propagandize
by means of photographic images. He used his emblematic
axonometric drawing of the Notre-Dame du Phare cathedral as
the stamp on the binding of the three editions of the Elementi. In
his works, moreover, Sartoris gave an important place to this type
of representation, which the avant-garde perceived as ideal
because it was exhaustive, synthesizing and abstract and therefore elevated to the rank of an independent work of art. This brings
up a new problematic area to explore: is the relationship between
axonometry and photography one of compatibility, complementarity,
or competition 60 ?